Friday, November 7, 2014

I entered this contest, a "micro fiction" contest, that this online magazine was sponsoring for Halloween. I entered five times, in fact, one micro-story for each of their 5 categories: Science experiments gone amok, sea monsters, banshees, demons and hellhounds. Of course I didn't win, nor did I expect to. But c'mon, they were just 250 words apiece. That's less than a page. It's not like it took me months of hard typing. And I'd planned all along to publish the stories myself, here and on my Facebook page, after the contest ended. Which it has. Thus I am. Here, in no particular order, are my 5 submissions. Short but sweet. At least I think they are sweet. Well, maybe sweet isn't the right word. But I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out, anyway. Hope you like 'em.

KRIEGHUND

Otto
did not fear death half so much as he feared the Hund.
He,
like all soldiers in those days of the Great War, had seen enough death to
become inured to it. He laid there in the darkness, in the mud, rain spattering
his face. He didn’t know how many bullets he’d caught. Enough. God, let me die before it finds me!

The
beast prowled the barren fields between the trenches, feeding on dead and
living alike, summoned from Hell by thundering artillery, the screams of dying
men, the stench of fly-blown corpses. Otto had seen it—big as a horse, blacker
than the inside of a coffin, jaws drooling bloody froth, belching smoke from
mouth and nostrils with each breath. The Hound of Hell, they called it. Helhund. He’d heard the screams of the
men, wounded but alive, when it found them. Heard their screams, then the
crunching of their bones.

Please, God, let me die!Smoke
hung like fog over the field, the rain unable to disperse it. Through the fog,
Otto saw two lamps, burning, growing larger, brighter, hot and red.The
eyes of the Hund.No! Not yet!

It
trotted towards him, enormous paws splashing in the mud. The growl that rumbled
up from its chest mimicked the angry thunder.Otto
feared the Hund more than death. For
the Hund, like War, devoured not only
men’s flesh, but their souls.The
Hund would eat well tonight.

Everyone
said Killarney House was haunted. Since their coming to America, since
they’d constructed the house, every member of the O’Hurlahee family had died
there, their deaths foretold by the wailing Banshee that had followed them from
their native Ireland.
The all heard the Banshee before they died, so the story went.

In
the ten years since she’d bought the house, Frances hadn’t seen—or heard—any
ghost.

She
had seen plenty of annoying
teenagers, though.

She’d
chase them away; they’d come back. She’d turn the garden hose on them; they
filmed her with their cellphones.

“You’re
making it worse,” friends told her. “Putting on a show for them.”

“Horseshit!”
Frances
always replied.

Tonight
a carload of the brats sat parked across the street, honking their horn to
torment her, calling her name. Frances
tried to ignore it but at last her nerves gave out. She seized a frying pan
from its peg on the wall and charged out the front door. She’d show them.

“Here
she comes!”

“Get
out of here!” Frances
charged into the street.

Then
she heard it. Her bone marrow turned to ice. The screech of the Banshee.

All
the world knew about the creations—many called them abominations—of Amman Natarajan. The first to release the genie
from its test tube, they said, Natarajan had battered down the doors of
collective argument and taboo (moral, legal, practical) against manipulation of
human/animal DNA, with those doors never again becoming fixed to their hinges.
Natarajan had been first, and generator of the expectant publicity. But there
were others.

Others,
with pure motives (all the world agreed that Natarajan had gone insane, and
this madness had fueled his motivations), were for the most part ignored by the
journalists and masses. Benign intentions = boring = 0% public interest. Thus
no one paid attention when the team of scientists announced the creation of the
slime mold engineered to consume carbon in gaseous and solid form. An organism,
intelligent as any human, a “Pollution Eater” to deploy on the ocean floor to
swallow seeping methane and crude, to line the interiors of smokestacks, to
float atop rivers, to spread like carpet atop skyscraper rooftops. A good
thing, a benefit, and welcome in the world.

No
one bothered to ask the Eater how it felt about things.

Turns
out, it didn’t like the idea of being humanity’s servant.

Turns
out, those scientists neglected to engineer the Eater with any weaknesses: not fire,
not cold, not radiation, nada.

In
1997, at 50 degrees S Latitude, 100 degrees W Longitude in the Pacific Ocean,
two U.S. Navy sonar recorders, stationed 3000 miles apart, registered a sound.
For both pieces of equipment to have detected this sound at such distance from
each other, the sound would have to have been very, very loud.

Scientists
determined the sound, dubbed (with little imagination on their parts) “the
Bloop,” constituted something biological
in origin. Problem is, they also estimated that any animal capable of producing
such a racket would have to be many times larger than a Blue Whale, the world’s
largest animal. There is nothing in the oceans big enough to have produced that
sound.

Nothing
known, that is.

Beneath
the waves—gentle, tranquil, cerulean blue and jade green; or roiling,
bruise-black, pelted by rain and strafed by hurricane winds into mountainous
waves; warm at the tropics; frigid, capped by ice at the poles; polluted; in a
few places clean; and teeming with a billion billion lives—down beneath all of that,
slept Jormungandr, the Midgard
Serpent, coiled twice around the world, tail in mouth, sleeping but aware,
waiting, listening. For what? Some signal, some unspoken, intangible prompting,
telling it the time drew near, Ragnarok and final battle at hand.

In
1997, Jormungandr heard that call. It
opened its eyes. It opened its jaws, jaws wide enough to swallow the moon, in
response.

We are fire, the Djinn had said to the
Creator. They are clay. To them we will
never bow. Thus God cursed the Djinn. You
are outcast, He decreed. Perhaps, as
you share in Man’s suffering, you will find kinship.

As
Az’rl listened to the man’s howls of pain echoing over the honeycombed hills,
through the bowels of the caves, the Djinn
had to confess it did feel empathy.
But only because Az’rl itself had so recently suffered.

The
other men were Bedouin. Their captive, bound by his wrists, stretched into a Y
between two posts, bore lighter skin, hair, eyes. A foreigner. Is that why they are torturing him?
Az’rl wondered. Or did he, like me, offer
insult?

Az’rl had offended Ibliss, greatest of Djinn, whom men called Satan, by whose order the hordes had
swarmed on Az’rl, sought to destroy it. Az’rl had scarce escaped, and not
without injury.

The
others were still hunting Az’rl.

The
pale man succumbed at last.

“Leave
him for the vultures!” one said.

No, Az’rl thought. This clay will serve a higher purpose.

A
whirlwind skipped across the sands; in its midst suspended two flaming eyes.
Wind became smoke, and entered the nostrils and mouth of the corpse.

A perfect place to hide, Az’rl thought
to itself.

Snapping
the ropes that bound it, the Djinn
started off upon the Bedouins’ trail.